Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/534

508 round the figure of clay and the invocating of his name by the medicine-men certainly might have led up to it.

If such a change as a recognised religion had ever become possible, I feel that it would have been brought about by those men who are the depositaries of the tribal beliefs, and by whom in the past, as I think, all the advances in the organisation of their society have been effected. If such a momentous change to the practice of religion had ever occurred, those men would have readily passed from being medicine-men to the office of priests.